Outdated Final Project Guidelines

Necessary elements

Your project is a narrative, so it needs to have writing. But it also needs to incorporate in some way these elements from our semester’s work. (Remember all we’ve learned about embedding your projects into WordPress!)

  • Primary sources (at least 3), including full citations with hyperlink
  • Visualization
  • Timeline
  • Historical map (not necessary to use the georeferenced one)
  • StoryMap

You also need secondary sources, which you should cite using Chicago style.

The setup

Before you ever start writing the words that will eventually appear as your narrative, you need to do some planning. Use pencil and paper!

  • Think about the goals and perspective of your narrative.
    • What are you trying to prove? (Yes, even just telling the story of a war is trying to prove something.)
    • Whose perspective are you prioritizing?
    • What sources are you using to bolster your narrative?
  • Assemble your research.
    • You should be using outside sources to help shape your narrative. These can be either primary or secondary. You have already gathered some primary and secondary sources; you may need to gather more!
  • Plan the beginning and end of your narrative.
    • Are you starting at the inciting incident? Are you starting before that?
    • Are you ending at the treaty? Or afterwards?
    • Why are you choosing these benchmarks? (You don’t have to answer this question in your narrative, per se, but you need to KNOW the answer before you start writing.)
  • Plan the middle of your narrative.
    • Which events will you focus on? Why?
    • Which groups of people will you prioritize?
    • How will you deal with the fact that you may have to tell a story where multiple events are occurring simultaneously?
  • Plan for background material and deep dives.
    • Where do you need to zoom out your narrative to provide more background (on unfamiliar terms, events leading up to your events, etc.) These background pieces don’t need to go right at the beginning!
    • How will you approach topics that are fun, interesting, and specific, but don’t necessarily fit into your narrative? For example, if you’re writing about the American Revolution, maybe you want to take a minute to talk about the whole life of George Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear. How do you tell his story without breaking the flow of your main argument?

The first draft

Once you have a plan, you can start writing in a word processor or plain-text editor. The goal for this draft is just putting words on the page.

  • What’s your first sentence?
    • Your first sentence should make people want to keep reading. A few good suggestions for how to craft an opening are here.
  • What’s your first paragraph?
    • Your first paragraph should situate your conflict. Elaborate on your first sentence. Give us some additional context. Front-load your information: give us a general overview of where this narrative is going.
  • How are you dividing your text?
    • Paragraphs: Readable paragraphs for web writing are usually fairly short, only a few sentences. Each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence.
  • How are you backing up your claims?
    • Remember that you should be citing outside sources for anything you didn’t already know before taking this class.
    • Use Zotero to create citations for your secondary sources.
    • Use this guide to help craft citations for primary sources.
    • Please use Chicago-style citations. If you don’t know how to do Chicago, let Zotero do it for you and use the guide referenced above.
    • Refer to your primary sources in the text—don’t let them just be illustrations. Use them to move your argument forward.
  • Mark where in the text you’ll be including visuals (like a map, a graph, or a primary source image); you don’t have to add them yet.

The second draft

You’re not done once you’ve written a draft! Now starts the real hard work: editing. After writing your first draft, you may have lost sight of some of your planning. Go back and revisit those plans; if they’ve changed (that’s ok!!), ask why. If your reasoning is better now, stick with the change. If not, rewrite to match the original plan.

Text written for web reading has a few special challenges, and now is the time to think about them. The goal of this draft is increased clarity.

Edit your narrative.

  • Read your narrative out loud. Mark places that sound clunky and revisit them.
  • Give your narrative to a friend and ask them to read it. Ask them to note any terms or concepts that aren’t clear. Take their comments seriously.
  • Re-read your narrative after a friend reads it.
    • Increase clarity by shortening your sentences if they need it.
    • Vary your sentence structure.
    • Make sure all your pronouns have proper antecedents.
    • Check your paragraphs: do your topic sentences guide the rest of the paragraph?

Organize your text.

  • Sections: Web readability goes up when you divide your narrative into sections.
    • Where are the logical breaks in your narrative? e.g.,
      • Different theaters of war
      • Years
      • Different sides of the story
    • Use headings (h2, h3) to give your sections informational names.
  • Pages: web readability also goes up if you break up your text into pages. If you have to scroll down several times in order to read your entire narrative, it’s time to break up your text into pages.
    • Use the same principles for breaks as for sections; just think more broadly.
    • Make sure you provide a link to get both to the next page in the series and also back to the home page.
  • Citations for your visuals
    • Every visual should have a caption.
    • Every caption for an image you found or created elsewhere on the Internet should include a hyperlink back to the original.
    • Every caption should also have identifying information so that the viewer knows where the visual came from even without clicking on the link (e.g., archive, collection).
    • Every caption should also have identifying information about what the visual is (e.g., title, creator, date). This is both to give proper context and credit as well as to provide information necessary for a user using a screen reader.
    • Even though you haven’t placed your visuals yet, you should write the captions now. Use them as placeholders for where you want your visuals to go.

The third draft (in your final medium!)

The third draft is in the medium you’ve chosen for your project (e.g., WordPress). The focus for this draft is legibility in the medium.

  • Paste your text in plain text into your medium. Then preview it to see what it will look like on the front end. If anything looks weird, make a note and then figure out how to fix it.
    • Bear in mind that copying in plain text strips out all formatting. You will need to add back in formatting such as italics, boldface, and others.
  • Now add your visuals in. Make sure you embed interactive elements proeperly! And make sure the caption is visible.
  • Now check your headers and breaks; do they still make sense with the visuals in place? If not, move them.
  • Now check for formatting.
    • Did you italicize:
      • Book titles
      • Journal titles
      • Ship names
    • Did you put in quotation marks:
      • All quoted text
      • Journal article titles
      • Web article titles
    • Are all your hyperlinks active but linked through normal text? (e.g., “DPLA", not “DPLA, https://dp.la/")
  • Now PROOFREAD.
    • Are all your sentences complete sentences?
    • Did you spell everything correctly? (Check in both your main text and in your visuals!)
    • Did you use proper grammar?
  • Create your bibliography; remember that you must cite primary and secondary sources in your text and they must all be in your bibliography.

Final touches

To really set your project apart, here are a few more things you should do.

  • Make an About page for yourself (somewhere other than on the same page as your project). Tell us a little about who you are and why this project is interesting to you.
  • Make a “Related projects” page where you link to any interesting document collections or websites that you found about your conflict.
  • Look through your whole website and identify elements that look like they’re still boilerplate (e.g., “Just another WordPress blog,” an address in New York City). Figure out how to change them.

Some examples